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March 17, 2015
CCS Bard Presents Moves & Countermoves
Press Contact:
Mark Primoff
845.758.7412
primoff@bard.edu
CCS Bard Contact:
Ramona Rosenberg
845.758.7574
rrosenberg@bard.edu

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY, March 2014 – The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard) presents eleven exhibitions and projects curated by second-year students in its graduate program in curatorial studies and contemporary art with ten individual exhibitions curated by each student, along with a student curated Marieluise Hessel Collection show. Moves & Countermoves will be on view from March 29 - May 3, 2015, with the opening reception taking place on Sunday, March 29th from 1:00-4:00 p.m.

Moves & Countermoves explores exhibition-making as a game of establishing and breaking its own rules of engagement. Focusing on the relations between viewer, artwork, display, and institution, contemporary curatorial practice is interpreted here as a ‘slight of hand’ tactic serving to play out, and to confound competing values within the art world.

Works from the Marieluise Hessel Collection are shuffled and reshuffled as curators and artists impose various selection criteria upon them. Moves & Countermoves draws from the collection to highlight a gameplay of exhibition–making strategies. Inside the museum and beyond its walls, artworks from divergent histories are placed in casual opposition to each other over a constructed platform, evoking a game board, populated with idiosyncratic pieces. Moves & Countermoves demonstrates how display affects visibility and cultural dissemination, altering the implicit rules determining what is seen and unseen within the Marieluise Hessel Collection. Some of the works chosen from the Marieluise Hessel Collection for Moves & Countermoves include pieces by Janine Antoni, Keith Edmier, Robert Gober, Rachel Harrison, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

The CCS Bard Class of 2015 thesis exhibitions parallel these explorations. Utilizing different selection criteria and display methods, the ten thesis exhibitions obliquely demonstrate curatorial gameplay and how it inherently shifts values within cultural economies. Enacting strategies of exhibition-making, some curatorial practices establish rules, while others reinvent them.

In Moves & Countermoves, the exhibitions investigate what it means to operate in a field that thrives upon the making and breaking of its own rules. Game, set, and match.

Student-curated exhibitions and projects at CCS Bard are made possible with support from the Rebecca and Martin Eisenberg Student Exhibition Fund; the Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg Family Foundation; the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation; the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation; the Board of Governors of the Center for Curatorial Studies; the CCS Bard Arts Council; and by the Center’s Patrons, Supporters, and Friends.

The CCS Bard Galleries and Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College are open Thursday through Sunday from 11:00a.m. to 6:00 p.m. All CCS Bard exhibitions and public programs are free and open to the public. Limited free seating is available on a chartered bus from New York City for the March 29 opening. Reservations are required; call +1 845-758-7598 or email ccs@bard.edu.